The car was now passing over a slender bridge spanning a wide and rather dirty river. The spectacle of so much genuine water was impressive, but it looked very cold and dismal on this dreary night.
“The Potomac,” said Washington. “But wait until you see it on a sunny day, after that silt’s gone downstream. Then it’s blue and sparkling, and you’d never guess it took two hundred years of hard work to get it that way. And that’s Watergate-not the original, of course; that was pulled down around 2000, though the Democrats wanted to make it a national monument. And the
Kennedy Center-that is the original, more or less. Every fifty years some architect tries to salvage it, but now it’s been given up as a bad job.”
So this was Washington, still basking (though not very effectively, on a night like this)) in its former glories. Duncan had read that the physical appearance of the city had changed very little in three hundred years, and he could well believe it. Most of the old government and public buildings had been carefully preserved. The result, said the critics, was the largest inhabited museum in the world.
A little later, the car turned into a driveway which led through beautifully kept lawns. There was a gentle beeping from the control
panel, and a sign flashed beneath the steering handle: SWITCH TO MANUAL George Washington took over, and proceeded at a cautious twenty klicks between flower beds and sculptured bushes, coming to a halt under the portico of an obviously very old building. It seemed much too large for a private house, but rather too small for a hotel, despite the fact that it bore the sign, in lettering so elaborate that it was almost impossible to read: CENTENNIAL HOTEL.
Professor Washington seemed to have an extraordinary knack of anticipating questions before they could be asked.
“It was built by a railroad baron, in the late nineteenth century. He wanted to have somewhere to entertain Congress, and the investment paid him several thousand percent. We’ve taken it over for the occasion, and most of the official guests will be staying here.”
To Duncan’s astonishment-and embarrassment, since personal service was unknown on Titan-his scanty baggage was seized by two black gentlemen wearing gorgeous liveries. One of them addressed him in a soft, musical language of which he could not comprehend a single word.
“You’re overdoing it, Henry,” George Washington remonstrated mildly. “That may be genuine slave patter, but what’s the point if only you linguistic historians can understand it? And where did you get that make-up? I may need some myself.”
Despite this appeal, Duncan still found the reply unintelligible. On their way up in a gilded birdcage of a tiny elevator, Washington commented: “I’m afraid Professor Murchison is entering too thoroughly into the Spirit of ‘76. Still, it shows we’ve made some progress. A couple of centuries ago, if you’d suggested to him that he play one of his humbler ancestors, even in a pageant, he’d have knocked your head off. Now he’s having a perfectly wonderful time, and we may not be able to get him back to his classes at
Georgetown.”
Washington looked at his plump, brown hand and sighed. “It’s getting more and more difficult to find a genuine black skin. I’m no race snob,” he added hastily, “but it will be a pity when we’re all the same shade of off white. Meanwhile, I suppose you do have a slightly unfair advantage.”
Duncan looked at him for a moment with puzzled incomprehension. He had never given any more thought to his skin color than to that of his hair; indeed, if suddenly challenged, he would have been hard pressed to describe either. Certainly he had never thought of himself as black; but now he realized, with understandable satisfaction, that he was several shades darker than George Washington, descendant of African kings.
When the door of the hotel suite closed behind him, and it was no longer necessary to keep up appearances, Duncan collapsed thankfully into one of the heavily padded chairs. It tilted backward so voluptuously that he guessed it had been especially designed for visitors from low-gravity worlds. George Washington was certainly an admirable host and seemed to have thought of everything. Nevertheless, Duncan knew that it would be a long time before he felt really at ease.
Quite apart from the drag of gravity, there were dozens of subtler reminders that he was not on his home world. One was the very size of the room; by Titanian standards, it was enormous. And it was furnished in such luxury as he had never seen in real life, but only in historical plays. Yet that, of course, was completely appropriate; he was living in the middle of history. This mansion had been built before the first man had ventured beyond the atmosphere, and he guessed that most of its fittings were contemporary. The cabinets full of delicate glassware, the oil paintings, the quaint old photographs of stiffly posed and long-forgotten eminences (perhaps the original Washington-no, cameras hadn’t been invented tfien), the heavy drapes-none of these could have been matched on Titan, and Duncan doubted if their holographic patterns were even stored in the Central
Library. The very communications console looked as if it dated back to the last century. Although all the elements were familiar-the blank gray screen, the alphanumeric keyboard, the camera lens and speaker grille-something about the design gave it an oldfashioned appearance. When he felt that he could again walk a few yards without danger of collapse, Duncan made his way cautiously to the console and parked himself heavily on the chair in front of it.
The type and serial numbers were in the usual place, tucked away at the side of the screen. Yes, there was the date-2183. It was almost a hundred years old.
Yet apart from a slight fuzziness of the “e” and “a” on the contact pads, there was practically no sign of wear. And why should there be, in a piece of equipment that did not contain a single moving part?
This was another sharp reminder that Earth was an old world, and had learned to conserve the past. Novelty for its own sake was an unlamented relic of the centuries of waste. If a piece of equipment functioned satisfactorily, it was not replaced merely because of changes in style, but only if it broke down, or there was some fundamental improvement in performance. The home communications console—or Comsole-had reached its technological plateau in the early twenty-first century, and Duncan was prepared to bet that there were units on Earth that had given continuous service for over two hundred years.
And that was not even one tenth of the history of this world. For the first time in his life, Duncan felt an almost overwhelming sense of inferiority.
He had not really believed that the Terrans would regard him as a
barbarian from the outer darkness; but now he was not so sure.
EMBASSY
Duncan’s Minisec: had been a parting gift from Colin, and he was not completely familiar with its controls. There had been nothing really wrong with his old unit, and he had left it behind with some regret; but the casing had become stained and battle scarred and he had to agree that it was not elegant enough for Earth.
The “Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what could fit comfortably in the normal human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use in the late twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine how life would be possible without it.
Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had no more controls than its ancestors of three centuries earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had a virtually unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation-for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode. Thus on ALPHANUMERIC, twenty-six of the studs bore the letters of the alphabet, while ten showed the digits zero to nine. On MATH, the letters disappeared from the alphabetical studs and were replaced by X, +, - , —, =, and all the standard mathematical functions.